Mick Jagger Read Online Free

answering awkward questions about his sex life. But the same blackboard-wipe obliterates career highs and lows unmatched by anyone else in his profession. How is it possible to “forget,” say, meeting Andrew Loog Oldham or living with Marianne Faithfull or refusing to ride on the London Palladium’s revolving stage or getting banged up in Brixton Prison or featuring in Cecil Beaton’s diaries or being spat at on the New York streets or inspiring a London Times editorial or ditching Allen Klein or standing up to homicidal Hell’s Angels at the Altamont festival or getting married in front of the world’s massed media in Saint-Tropez or being fingerprinted in Rhode Island or making Steven Spielberg fall on his knees in adulation or having Andy Warhol as a child minder or being stalked by naked women with green pubic hair in Montauk or persuading a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park to shut up and listen to a poem by Shelley?
    Such is the enduring paradox of Mick: a supreme achiever to whom his own colossal achievements seem to mean nothing, a supreme extrovert who prefers discretion, a supreme egotist who dislikes talking about himself. Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, and the one least affected by all the madness, put it best: “Mick doesn’t care what happened yesterday. All he ever cares about is tomorrow.”
    So let’s flick through those yesterdays in hopes of refreshing his memory.

PART ONE
“THE BLUES IS IN HIM”

CHAPTER ONE
India-Rubber Boy
    TO BECOME WHAT we call “a star,” it is not enough to possess unique talent in one or another of the performing arts; you also seemingly need a void inside you as fathomlessly dark as starlight is brilliant.
    Normal, happy, well-rounded people do not as a rule turn into stars. It is something which far more commonly befalls those who have suffered some traumatic misery or deprivation in early life. Hence the ferocity of their drive to achieve wealth and status at any cost, and their insatiable need for the public’s love and attention. While awarding them a status near to gods, we also paradoxically view them as the most fallible of human beings, tortured by past demons and present insecurities, all too often fated to destroy their talent and then themselves with drink or drugs or both. Since the mid-twentieth century, when celebrity became global, the shiniest stars, from Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Edith Piaf to Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, and Amy Winehouse, have fulfilled some if not all of these criteria. How, then, to account for Mick Jagger, who fulfills none of them?
    Jagger bucked the trend with his very first breath. We expect stars to be born in unpromising locales that make their later rise seem all the more spectacular … a dirt-poor cabin in Mississippi … a raffish seaport … the dressing room of a seedy vaudeville theater … a Parisian slum. We do not expect them to be born in thoroughly comfortable but unstimulating circumstances in the English county of Kent.
    Southern England has always been the wealthiest, most privileged part of the country, but clustered around London is a special little clique of shires known rather snootily as “the Home Counties.” Kent is the most easterly of these, bounded in the north by the Thames Estuary, in the south by Dover’s sacred white cliffs and the English Channel. And, rather like its most famous twentieth-century son, it has multiple personalities. For some, this is “the Garden of England” with its rolling green heart known as the Weald, its apple and cherry orchards and hop fields, and its conical redbrick hop-drying kilns or oast houses. For others, it conjures up the glory of Canterbury Cathedral, where “turbulent priest” Thomas à Becket met his end, or stately homes like Knole and Sissinghurst, or faded Victorian seaside resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. For others, it suggests county cricket, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, or